Conservatives Without Conscience

on the poll, range from a quarter to a third of the electorate. A Zogby poll reported that conservative Christians account for an astounding 58 percent of all Republicans.[49] In 2000, 68 percent of white Protestant evangelicals voted for Bush and Cheney. In 2004 that statistic rose to 78 percent.[50] But it is not at the presidential level that conservative Christians have their greatest impact. “The religious right’s power lies in the lower parts of the Republican machinery, in precinct meetings and the like,” the Economist reported.[51] Without the support of Christian conservatives Republicans cannot even get nominated to local, state, and national offices, because they have become the filter through which all Republicans must pass today. Christian conservatives have a virtual lock on state and local Republican politics, and have totally outmaneuvered their opposition. “In American politics,” wrote Joel Rogers of the University of Wisconsin, “who controls the states controls the nation. The right understands this, and for a generation has waged an unrelenting war to take over state government in America. It has succeeded, in large part because it hasn’t faced any serious progressive counter effort.”[52]

Who are these people? In 2004 the Pew Trust sponsored a two-day seminar for leading journalists, calling the gathering “Toward an Understanding of Religion and American Public Life.” Religion historian Mark Noll, an evangelical who has authored several books on the subject, led a discussion about contemporary evangelicals. He explained their core religious beliefs, and noted that these religious commitments by themselves have not resulted in a cohesive, institutionally compact, or clearly demarcated group of Christians. There is, in reality, a large network of churches, voluntary societies, books and periodicals, and personal connections, as well as varying levels of belief and practice that fall under the evangelical label.[53] Noll pointed out that although certain Supreme Court rulings had caused evangelicals to become increasingly politically active, Roe v. Wade had been the tipping point. Before Roe, evangelicals were no more political than Billy Graham, thus either apolitical or unobtrusively political, and not active in politics. After Roe, self-appointed leaders within the evangelical movement became militant activists. “Baptists [ministers] Jerry Falwell and Timothy LaHaye, and the lay psychologist James Dobson, entered politics with a vengeance during the 1970s and 1980s,” said Noll. They “created the new religious right and have made conservative evangelical support so important for the Republican Party since the campaigns of Ronald Reagan.” Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign, albeit unsuccessful in even coming close to getting the Republican nomination, further politicized a large segment of the evangelical community, Noll added.

Noll candidly acknowledged the authoritarian nature of evangelicals. Speaking as an evangelical and a historian of evangelicalism, he noted its incompatibly with the give-and-take of politics because of the rigidity of its beliefs. Noll said he wants evangelicals to learn “new ways of being present in the public space without believing that [they] have to dominate the public space” (emphasis in original transcript). Evangelical Christianity, he explained, is an intolerant religion, unable to say “your religion is fine with you; my religion is fine with me.” Rather “evangelical religion is offensive. It claims forthrightly that there is one, and only one, way to God,” and that is their way. The world has evolved, and Noll realized that evangelicals, so far, have not.[54]

Several attendees at the Pew conference referred to the work of a University of North Carolina sociologist, Christian Smith, who has studied how rank-and-file evangelicals think. One conferee said of Smith’s work that it showed that the rank-and-file is “a lot nicer than their leaders!”[55] Smith’s work supports the notion that the religious right’s political thinking and behavior may be less than uniform, and that the leaders of the Christian right do not necessarily speak for evangelicals as a whole.[56] While this may be true of the segment of the population investigated by Smith and his collaborators, their sample appears unrepresentative.[57] In the end, I found that the observations of Mark Noll—who deals with a wide array of evangelical brothers and sisters, day in and day out—as well as those of politically attuned observers such as Cal Thomas, a conservative syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator, and former president Jimmy Carter seemed more insightful and revelatory. All of these individuals have been critical of Christians in politics while remaining true to their faiths.[*]

Cal Thomas, a conservative Christian who once served as vice president of communications for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, has joined journalist and evangelical minister Ed Dobson in making “a strong case for the church to lay down its impotent weapons of political activism.”[58] Based on his experience at the heart of Christian right politics, Thomas said he believes that all the evangelical energy now devoted to politics could be better directed toward living and sharing the gospel. He has concluded that neither “our individual or collective cultural problems can be altered exclusively, or even mainly, through the political process.” Thomas found that “the marriage of religion and politics almost always compromises the gospel,” for “[p]olitics is all about compromise.” The conflation of church and state has resulted in the church’s getting “its theological pocket picked.” “Whenever the church cozies up to political power,” he continued, “it loses sight of its all-important mission to change the world from the inside-out.”[59]

Not surprisingly, Thomas does not approve of the political tactics employed by Christian conservatives. For example, when fund-raising, “they identify an enemy: homosexuals, abortionists, Democrats, or ‘liberals’ in general,” he explained. Then, these enemies are accused, falsely, of being out to “get us” or “impose their morality on the rest of us or destroy the country.” An action plan is offered—“We will oppose the enemies and ensure that they do not take over America”—and a plea for funds follows.[60] The focus is inevitably negative, and often the claims are outrageous, such as Pat Robertson’s claim that God wanted him “to help usher in the Second Coming.” Robertson denied making such a statement, and when Thomas produced a copy of the fund-raising letter in question, he was immediately vilified. Thomas noted that Robertson and others “must constantly have enemies, conspiracies, and opponents as well as play the role of righteous victim in order to get people to send in money.” Understandably, Thomas is troubled by the irony that the Bible calls on Christians to love their enemies, “whether they be homosexuals, abortionists, Democrats, or liberals.”[61]

Former president Jimmy Carter speaks with unique insight about mixing politics and religion. In Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, Carter wrote that this nation’s leaders once “extolled state and local autonomy, attempted to control deficit spending, avoided foreign adventurism, minimized long-term peacekeeping commitments, preserved the separation of church and state, and protected civil liberties and personal privacy.” However, today’s leaders—he does not mention Christian conservatives because it is obvious to whom he is referring—have placed far more divisive issues at the center of their platform: “abortion, the death penalty, science versus religion, women’s rights, the separation of religion and politics, homosexuality.” These debates, he noted, have divided the nation and threatened America’s traditional values. Carter said he believes the most important factor in that divisiveness is that “fundamentalists have become increasingly influential in both religion and government, and have managed to change the nuance and subtleties of historic debate into black-and-white rigidities and the personal derogation of those who dare to disagree.” He added, “Narrowly defined theological beliefs have been adopted as the rigid agenda of a political party.” [62]

The former president went on to describe religious fundamentalists based on his personal observations and experiences. (Carter appeared to use the term “fundamentalists” as including highly conservative evangelicals.) He said that, invariably, “fundamentalist movements are led by authoritarian males who consider themselves to be superior to others and, within religious groups, have an overwhelming commitment to subjugate women and to dominate their fellow believers.” He found that these people believe the past is better than the present; they draw clear distinctions between themselves, as true believers, and others; they are “militant in fighting against any challenges to their beliefs”; and they are “often angry” and sometimes resort “to verbal or even physical abuse against those who interfere with the implementation of their agenda.” Carter summarized the characteristics of fundamentalism as “rigidity, domination, and exclusion,”[63] a description that would apply equally to the authoritarian personalities introduced in the last chapter.

While neoconservatives are not religious fundamentalists, Carter said he believes that they hold related views. He had observed firsthand how neoconservatives evolved from criticizing his foreign policy—when he attempted to “impose liberalization and democratization” on other countries—to embracing his goals but to achieving them by employing very different means. Carter sought to spread democracy through diplomacy, while the neoconservatives “now seem to embrace aggressive and unilateral intervention in foreign affairs, especially to